Can research explain a tango?
A project to understand the special, ineffable experience of dancing Argentine tango
Although tango dancers disagree about a lot of things, I think most would agree that there’s something pretty special about the experience of actually dancing. It can be hard to talk about what that “pretty special” exactly is. It’s mysterious, ineffable — complicated! That’s why I’m so interested in the Inner Experience of Tango Project. Learn more about it or jump right and take the survey now.
As a community so far, most of our dialogue about the inner experience of tango has been on the fringes of our practice: impassioned poems, confessional posts, secret chats, post-milonga late-night confabs. Right now all we have is wild guesses and intuitions and inklings about how much we share (or don’t share) with others, but we have no data.
My friend Avik and I got inspired by the idea of centering this question and giving it some serious attention. We put on our research hats (we’re both research nerds) and gave some thought to how we might design a study to help shine a light on tango dancers’ inner experiences, on a collective level.
If we understood each other’s inner lives more, got a better sense of our collective joys and neuroses, tango dancers may be able to find deeper common ground and less superficial divisiveness. If we could see the patterns in how inner concerns and awarenesses evolve across a tango dancer’s maturity journey, maybe we could support those journeys better. You can help develop this knowledge by participating in the Inner Experience of Tango Project.